Stolen lunches? Substitute cat food for tuna on wheat

WORKING

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, August 24, 2006

It was a really good lunch — leftovers from dinner the night before accompanied by caramel flan, yogurt, a peach and delicate French cookies from a previous brown bag seminar.

Now, it could have been nicked accidentally. Or maybe someone was really hungry and needed the food. Either way, I was annoyed, and after taking an informal survey, it turns out I'm hardly the only victim.

When Patty Kingan was working as a secretary for a utility in Houston, she'd stock the communication's department refrigerator with sodas. But every morning when she'd come in, Kingan would find entire six-packs missing.

"We didn't know who was taking them," recalled Kingan, who began to notice that the "good drinks" — the Cokes and Diet Cokes, along with the root beer and orange drinks — disappeared the fastest.

"We'd put in Perrier every now and then — they didn't go for that," she said.

Kingan tried to stop the soda thief — or thieves — by writing notes. She started out nice: "The soft drinks are for the department only." Then got increasingly nasty: "We're going to report you." But to no avail.

Taping the refrigerator shut didn't work either, so Kingan eventually called maintenance to attach a lock.

"We'd laugh," she said, speculating that the culprits were contractors who worked at night. "We never did figure it out."

When Nora Dool was director of marketing for a career management firm, job seekers continually paraded in and out to take workshops and meet with consultants.

The office refrigerator was fairly accessible, and Dool heard plenty of complaints from her co-workers about missing sandwiches, restaurant leftovers and desserts.

But Dool said she was never a victim, and she attributes that to her diet.

"I only brought in frozen dinners," she said. "I guess no one wanted Lean Cuisine."

Maybe it's a matter of packaging, a point that was lost on me when I brought my lunch. I packed it in a cute sack with handles, and I placed it prominently on the front shelf.

If I had only put it in ragtag plastic grocery sack and shoved it in the back of the refrigerator so it looked like it had been there since New Year's, maybe no one would have touched it.

Taking revenge

After you've been the victim a few times, thoughts of revenge can begin to take shape.

When Dennis Hoard was an electrician apprentice, he'd bring a meatloaf sandwich every Thursday.

But every week the sandwich would disappear by lunchtime. Hoard suspected the foreman, a big guy who liked home cooking. So Hoard poured a laxative oil on his tasty sandwich one day.

"I thought I'd teach him a lesson," said Hoard, who is now a retired contractor in Willis. "He spent the rest of the day in one of the port-a-cans."

The foreman had some harsh words when he emerged from the toilet, but the two later became good buddies, Hoard recalled. And it established Hoard's reputation as someone not to be messed with.

Sometimes the subtle approach can be just as effective.

Brian Hill recalled the time when he worked at a local radio station and someone would regularly raid the weekend provisions of one of the anchors.

So the next time the weekend anchor made her popular tuna fish sandwiches, she changed the recipe a little, said Hill, who was an editor at the station.

"There was no tuna," said Hill, who is now director of public affairs for the Houston Zoo. "It was all Little Friskies."

And like usual, the nicely wrapped cat food salad sandwiches disappeared, so the anchor wrote up the popular recipe — including her secret ingredient — and posted it on the station's bulletin board for all to see.

"I always thought that was the most beautiful thing," said Hill, who said that from that point on, food was safe in the linoleum lounge.

The nonteam players

It's the other two who are not part of the team who can be a problem and are the likely culprits when confronted with the vast richness of the "office Serengeti,"as Buffini describes it.

Sometimes they're angry in a passive-aggressive way and act out by sabotaging the personal property of others, Buffini said. Others take lunches as a way to be funny or provocative.

And then there's a group that lacks integrity, rationalizing that there's no name on the bag or that the owner is overweight and could stand to skip a meal anyway.

So which department is most likely to steal a lunch?

Accounting, Buffini said, drawing on his experience with personality traits at work. They have to do things by the book, but they're often mad in a passive-aggressive way.

Another likely candidate is the customer-service department, because personnel there are under constant pressure and have to handle angry people, he said.

As for the least likely lunch bandits, Buffini said, it's managers because of the scrutiny they're under from all sides, as well as "hero" departments like information technology, which come to your aid when you're down.

And the mellow marketing folks get so many gift baskets that they're not interested in someone else's tuna sandwich, he added.

Caught in the act

And don't think home-office workers are immune from missing out on lunch.

Freda Blackwell, who works from home in Katy as a sales associate for DBM, was eating her carefully prepared ham and cheese sandwich at her kitchen table when the phone rang, and she ran to answer it.

When she returned, Blackwell found that Henry, her dachshund, had taken her place. He was sitting on the chair with his paws on the desk, munching away.

"He loves cheese," Blackwell said with a laugh. "You still have to guard your lunch."